Falling Action

They All Want Their Stuff Back

When Imatar lifted their head and forced open their eyelids—both weighed down with heavy boulders—they had believed the poison they kept shooting into them was powerful enough to make them hallucinate. It would certainly explain how Agni had an arrow sticking out of his arm and only seemed briefly dizzy. You didn’t fall into a volcano and come back stronger than before.

What They Do In Their Spare Time

Metal clanged against metal. Blood dripped into Agni’s eyes and he blinked it away before it returned to his body. Melusine was not holding back, and she brought up her knee faster than he could see. It connected with his chin and he was momentarily blinded by stars in his vision. But he couldn’t pause. When she was determined to win, she was as relentless as a tidal wave.

He swung his sword back around and stepped back, and the blade blocked hers before she sliced open his neck. A fight to the death, albeit one where the dead would get up after being restored.

It had been going on for a while. Typical Melusine, she had to prove she was the best, and he had to admit, a sword was the one weapon she had more skill than him with. Even after ten thousand years, his movements remained rigid with some old training he could not shake. He even started the same way every time, blade pointed up in front of his face, then at an angle, then to the side as he raised his other arm, the one that was supposed to carry a shield. It was from before he became a Knight, and he did not know why, but preforming the motions always filled him with great sadness. Yet he could not stop.

Melusine’s foot connected with his groin, and that would have crushed the genitals of anyone else. He brought his sword down and buried it in her leg, where it stuck in the bone. She grimaced as he yanked it out blood squelched out of the injury. Her sword sliced up under his armpit and severed the artery, and that was it for him. He planted his blade in the ground and nodded before he collapsed. Several minutes later, he woke up again, blinking, and found her stretching out her ankle.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“You left that opening,” she said. “Pathetic.”

“It does get boring after a while.”

One of the Otralian priests popped out of the cathedral doors, scurrying over while keeping his eyes averted and head bowed, which made him trip on his own feet. Totally unnecessary, as the Knights made clear several times, but they couldn’t get the priests to stop.

“Your Graces…” Polotan said in his demur, cozening voice. “You have been… sparring for hours now. Are you all right?”

Melusine’s eyelids flattened. “After so many years, our practicing can be on the epic side of things.”

“I see, Your Grace. If I may be so bold, are you quite finished? Please forgive me if I have offended you in any way.” And then he knelt, head bowed, was he seriously trembling? Agni’s toughest battle, far worse than Melusine, was keeping his mouth shut when he wanted to mock the man’s subservience, but that would be too cruel to someone who hadn’t done anything besides being annoying. Very, very annoying.

Part 1

Pain did nothing to describe it. Agony was a mere shadow. The burning, excruciating fire that consumed Agni as he pulled himself back together was the greatest hell he experienced in his long life. It could have taken a minute, it could have taken an eternity, all would be the same. It blotted out time and reason. Screams ripped out of him. Or maybe that was the sound of his bones and flesh knitting back into a whole.

He collapsed on ground that was smooth and warm, glass freshly out of the furnace, and it ground crumbled underneath his weight. He ran his hand along it and his power resonated louder than the pain, and realized the shear amount of energy radiating from the land.

Modifications will be required.

Fuck. Oh absolute fuck.

He slammed his hand on his head trying to keep the thoughts buried under several layers of indifference to be dealt with at a later date. Then he ran his hand over his scalp and his face and it was all smooth, because hair couldn’t rematerialize with the rest of his flesh. Great, so he’d have to deal with that, because he was not walking around with no hair. The bald look did not work for him.

One of the main ingredients for the spell was charcoal, which there would be a lot of in the vicinity now that the volcano had finished erupting. He squinted and lines flashed across his vision. Eyes weren’t all the way back yet. Gods, this was a bad one.

He made his way along by feel until his vision cleared enough for him to make out a glimmer of the moons, veiled in clouds—ash from the volcano. This was going to mess up the weather on the planet for days. But that was not in his scope of influence.

Farther down the mountain, the lava had hardened into a shell that had consumed the scraggly trees making up the forest. The heat would keep people away for a while, so no one would be wondering why the naked man was climbing down a mountain of searing lava. That was the sort of thing that attracted questions.

Almost Forgot To Post This

Fire rippled over Melusine and burned away most of the skin from her front—she’d had worse, yes, but not in a while. Pain blotted out everything else, but she focused on the ground underneath her, the pebbles showering down on her, and rose above it.

If Agni were here, this never would have—

Dragons Are Assholes

Last: Chapter 3

There was no time to think. Amaia stood where she was, waiting for the beast to clear the trees and make its final leap. Its skeletal head was low, almost nose to nose with her, and its powerful legs propelled it forward. It had been a few years since she had seen one so close. She’d been hunting with Father and their friends, Zera and Yan, and their father Mokai. They passed by a cave, really not much more than a gap in the rocks, and a monster popped out and snapped its jaws around Zera’s chest and dragged her into the gap. Her hands uselessly scrabbled against the rock, and the rest of them could only watch helplessly as Zera screamed and there was a sickening crunch.

The monster in front of her leapt. Amaia threw herself down and rolled, but she misjudged the edge of the cliff and her lower half was dangling off. She gripped the rocky face hard enough for the nails to bend back and there was a rush of wind as the monster flew over her head.

Last: Chapter 2

Everyone was up and packed well before dawn, but no one dared stepped out of the protective light of the fire until the sun had cleared the mountains to the east. Though they were tired, there was no time for an easy pace. They had to get as far away from the campsite as possible.

The last thing Amaia did before she left was fill her water skin at the creek, and she found fresh symbols carved into the rocks. Rough human figures, a curved arrow indicating their direction, and finally, a skull to indicate the monsters had been nearby.

They walked all day, swapping around the rafts and tents and small children. After the sun passed over head, they came to a river that lapped lazily on the surface but Amaia knew from years past was capable of pulling a person so far under they would never surface again. The strongest swimmers crossed first, holding one end of a rope, and people looped their arms around it while they dragged themselves across. At the end, when the rope was being coiled up, a frayed chunk disintegrated and nearly a third was almost swept away by the river. Father snatched it up and handed it back to the rope maker, who spent the rest of the day scrounging plants to repair the severed cord.

That night was spent in a clearing far from large enough for a group of nearly a hundred. Leaves were falling from dried out trees, and extra care had to be taken with the fires to prevent them from spreading. Amaia squatted down to watch the orange flames lick at the air.

“Where do they come from?” a little girl asked. It was her sixth summer, just one more until her naming ceremony.

“No one knows,” one of the grandfathers said, his tone indicating he hoped it would be the end of the subject. The monsters were whispered about, if they were acknowledged at all. In all her sixteen summers, Amaia had never heard them called anything but monsters.

“But they have to be from somewhere,” the girl said. “The ancestors lived it big and shining cities.”

As the story went, cities that glowed with light even at night. All laid to waste after the wars, and any hope of recovery destroyed when the monsters appeared. But that story had not been told to her by the grandparents but an older child, one who insisted the monsters had crawled out of the earth, while a different girl said they came from the stars. As she went to sleep, Amaia had to think the latter was more likely, as the absconders stole all the best tools and fled to the stars. She wouldn’t put it past them to have brought back a scourge just to punish their enemies.

The next few days were nothing but more walking, diverging from the river to avoid the cliffs. On the third day, while they picked grains from a yellowed field, a horrible thudding thundered through the sky and made Amaia and several of the other young ones clap their hands over their ears. Father shadowed his eyes and squinted as he scanned the sky, but it was Krist who spotted it first and pointed out the almost insectile contraption hovering around the mountains.

“Absconders,” Amaia said, the word burning on her tongue.

“No wonder the monsters are riled,” Lissou said. “Why do they come here? Do they enjoy checking on how much of the Earth they’ve destroyed?”

“We should get moving,” Biana said, squeezing her baby until he let out a disgruntled whimper. “Monsters will be fleeing the flyers. They hate the sound.”

Amaia bit down on her lip. She certainly didn’t like the noise of the flyers, but most agreed the monsters, though they could spot you during the blackest midnight, were unable to hear. Krist seemed to roll their eyes at Biana, but put a reassuring hand on Biana’s shoulder and urged her to keep moving.

“Father,” Amaia said as they headed through the plains. The raft strapped to her back weighed heavily, but it was her turn to haul it.

“I can always tell when you’re troubled,” he said. “You have the same wrinkle in your forehead as your mother.”

Amaia forced her face to relax. “Do the absconders have tools that could kill the monsters?”

As he could read her face, she could read his. When upset, his face went slack, almost as if he was no longer there. He chewed on his lip in a way Amaia recognized in her own mannerisms, and she shoved down the annoyance at how much she resembled the ones who raised her.

“They might,” he said. “To be honest, we’ve lost the knowledge of what their tools can do, just like we lost the knowledge of where the monsters came from.”

“Then they could kill them, but just… don’t. Do they hate us that much?”

Father’s face went even more slack. Though it was still far from the dead blank when he told her Mother had gone into the woods and not come back.

“You’ve heard stories of the wars,” he said. “All of our ancestors were cruel and destructive. Ours chose to stay and repair the damage to the Earth, but theirs left. That doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten what we did to them.”

“We don’t deserve this,” she said.

“No. We don’t.” He sighed and took the raft from her, even though it was not his turn yet. “I don’t believe they would save us if they could. Perhaps they’re waiting for us to die, then they’ll kill off the monsters so they can take the Earth back. Or scrounge whatever resources they can still extract and flee again.”

“I wish I could talk to them. Maybe I could convince them to save us.”

“I don’t think you could speak to them. Some of the bands we meet we can’t converse with because we have no languages in common. The absconders have been gone from Earth for two hundred generations at least. I’m not even sure they’re human anymore.”

He said this sadly, but she got the impression his regret was from dashing her hope, not from the inability to ask for help. Perhaps the old grudge was still alive, or perhaps he was simply resigned to a life of hiding behind fires and hoping the monsters were not hungry.

By late afternoon, they had reached cliffs, but no one felt safe pressed up against a wall where they could easily be pinned. They pressed on until people were getting nervous, and the forest had too many shadows, but the sun was rapidly descending. Everyone physically capable grabbed an axe or a knife to hack away at brush, and those who weren’t built fires from the leaves. Father was exhausted and dropped to sleep without setting up the tent. It wasn’t too bad. Insects scrawled up Amaia’s arms, but she just flicked them away.

The sky was cloudy, so thick the moon was only a glimmer of light behind a blanket. If it rained, they would have to set up the tents to keep the fires from going out anyway. Everyone would huddle around, sweating and choking from the lack of air, but they could not leave, if the monsters came…

She stood by the fires, watching the forest and periodically feeding the flames. Her heart beat thumped a little too quickly, and the tension in her muscles made Amaia doubt she’d be getting any sleep, even after the previous hurried, ragged nights. Sparks flared up and Lissou ran up with a bowl of dirt to smother them for the whole forest went up in flames.

“You should get some sleep,” he said to her. “I’ll take over.”

She could not convince him otherwise, so she laid down beside Father, shivering in spite of the heat and unable to relax. At this time of year, the west would still be engulfed in the summer fires, and getting to the coast would be impossible. To the east was mountains, and while there were groups that braved them, her people did not like the risk—monsters nested in caves, and there was no place to hide at night. South was desert. They would drift eastward until the equinox gathering, before turning west and moving along the coast for the winter. Plenty of fish, and the fires would clear out a lot of land and drive the monsters away. The best times were when they found areas that had burned a few years earlier, and were now fertile with fresh growth. As long as they stayed away from the frozen north, they would be safe, and during the solstice, many other bands would be in the region. She could picture the fires, the food they shared, meeting new people and sneaking away to be alone…

Finally, she slept, and her dreams were not disagreeable. Her mother was there, and even her older brother. Except he wasn’t the age she had last seen him at, which would have been fourteen summers, younger than she was now. He was a man who resembled Father, with a beard and a spear and a knack for tying snares that caught small game. He had the same one-sided grin as Mother did.

A scream shattered the dream, a sound she heard before from the small animals they caught in their snares. Amaia was on her feet before she was awake, and she barely opened her eyes when warm droplets of blood splattered across her chest. She blinked and Lissou was in front of her, keeping tubes of intestines in his stomach with his bare hands. He coughed up another spray of blood and dropped to the ground with a meaty thud.

“Father!” she shrieked, almost a prayer. All she could see was smoke and flames—a log rolled off and the leaves were catching. Another sickening crunch and a body flew in front of her. No, half a body, they had no legs and the smooth, bloody sphere leaking out must have been their stomach. They were still blinking. They were still alive.

She stepped around Lissou and began coughing. She crouched, arm over her mouth, and there was one of the grandfathers, his face drenched in blood, three deep rivets running down the front and one eye hanging by a thread. He dragged himself forward and Amaia reached down to help him only for a greasy hand to close around her wrist.

She was whirled around, nose to nose with her father.

“You will run,” he said. “Now.”

“I can’t leave them.”

“Survivors run. Head for the river fork. We can all meet up there.”

Then he was pulling her along, and she went with him even as she stepped over another body, and… oh my god, was that Biana’s baby? Tiny gray form, without a head. No. No-no-no.

A monster leapt through the trees, landing in front of her on its long, spindly legs. The firelight was melting parts of its skin, but it didn’t seem to mind.

Father jerked her back. “Run!”

“But—”

He grabbed her shoulder and shoved her away from the beast. She would never forgive herself, but she ran through the smoke and into the trees.

Leaves crumbled underneath her feet. Branches whipped against her face. Her knee slammed into a branch and she went flying, and there was a brief instant of weightlessness before she slammed into the ground. She pushed herself up and her front was throbbing, but her ears picked out the heavy thumps of massive footsteps, and she did not hesitate to launch herself in the opposite direction.

Smoke burned into her eyes and she was coughing again, and she could still hear it behind her, and it could probably see her much better than she could even see the branches knocking into her. Even when the trees pulled back she couldn’t see where she was going, and if she stepped in a burrow or tripped over another log, it would catch up to her and tear her to shreds.

Father, please.

She never should have left him. But then she’d be dead… What if he was dead? He couldn’t do that to her. Not after losing Mother and Dash. He couldn’t leave her alone.

There was a sickeningly wet gurgle behind her, but she didn’t dare look. She spotted the fallen tree in just enough time to leap over it, and the bark scraped across her knee but somehow she didn’t lose her balance. She ran, she ran, she ran because death was after her with claws and teeth. And it was getting closer.

Her side was starting to hurt, and her inner thigh twinged. All the trees fell away and she could only marvel at how black the night was. The grass and leaves no longer cushioned her feet, now there was nothing but dirt and stone. There would be nowhere to hide. She couldn’t stop until she was in the forest again, but she had no idea where she was supposed to be. The river wasn’t far, but—

The river! The cliffs!

Amaia skidded to a stop on her knees, skin scraping off her shins. One foot dangled off a sharp angle of rock, and she scrambled back. Her heartbeat drowned out anything else, but she could smell the water and feel the emptiness yawning up at her. The band’s path had been heading steadily upward as they headed through foothills.

Branches snapped behind her. She turned and the white shadow ran towards her, ready to cut her down.